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Personalized services are diffusing rapidly in online shopping communities. However, the current understanding of the influence of personalization is limited. This study extends personalization literature into the area of emotions related to intention to purchase and into the context of online shopping. Responses from 182 online shoppers were used to examine the impact of personalization on customer emotions and intention to purchase. The results show that there is a direct positive association between personalization and purchase intentions. In addition, provision of personalization features in e-shops may evoke positive emotions to online shoppers but does not evoke nor mitigate negative ones. Finally, our study reports that emotions influence online shopping behavior either positively, through the formulation of positive emotions, or negatively, through negative emotions. These findings indicate that positive emotions mediate the relationship between personalization and purchase intentions. Our study concludes with a critical appraisal of our findings and a discussion of prospective theoretical and managerial implications for e-shop practitioners.

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This research develops and tests a theoretical model of customer persuasion in personalized online shopping, building on information processing theory, and addressing cognitive and affective stages of the persuasion process. Data from 582 experienced online customers were used to validate the proposed model through structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis. Results show that quality of personalization, message quality, and benefits of the personalized recommendations are important in the persuasion process. Positive emotions increase the effect of persuasion on purchase intentions, contrary to negative emotions. The study extends online personalization theory, offers an in‐depth analysis of the persuasion process in online shopping, and provides valuable recommendations for personalized online marketing.

Service quality is a multi-dimensional construct which is not accurately measured by aspects deriving from numerical ratings and their associated weights. Extant literature in the expert and intelligent systems examines this issue by relying mainly on such constrained information sets. In this study, we utilize online reviews to show the information gains from the consideration of factors identified from topic modeling of unstructured data which provide a flexible extension to numerical scores to understand customer satisfaction and subsequently service quality. When numerical and textual features are combined, the explained variation in overall satisfaction improves significantly. We further present how such information can be of value for firms for corporate strategy decision-making when incorporated in an expert system that acts as a tool to perform market analysis and assess their competitive performance. We apply our methodology on airline passengers' online reviews using Structural Topic Models (STM), a recent probabilistic extension to Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) that allows the incorporation of document level covariates. This innovation allows us to capture dominant drivers of satisfaction along with their dynamics and interdependencies. Results unveil the orthogonality of the low-cost aspect of airline competition when all other service quality dimensions are considered, thus explaining the success of low-cost carriers in the airline market.

Customers increasingly consult opinions expressed online before making their final decisions. However, inherent factors such as culture may moderate the criteria and the weights individuals use to form their expectations and evaluations. Therefore, not all opinions expressed online match customers' personal preferences, neither can firms use this information to deduce general conclusions. Our study explores this issue in the context of airline services using Hofstede's framework as a theoretical anchor. We gauge the effect of each dimension as well as that of cultural distance between the passenger and the airline on the overall satisfaction with the flight as well as specific service factors. Using topic modeling, we also capture the effect of culture on review text and identify factors that are not captured by conventional rating scales. Our results provide significant insights for airline managers about service factors that affect more passengers from specific cultures leading to higher satisfaction/dissatisfaction.

Research on mobile commerce has attracted the interest of e-commerce scholars ever since mobile and portable devices became a widespread and effective means of commercial transactions and business practices. In the present editorial of this special issue of IJEC, we first revisit the past of m-commerce practice and research through an analysis of m-commerce-related publications and prevailing business models from 2000 to 2011. The analysis points to the increasingly topical and maturing status of the field, as well as to a gradual move from engineering-driven to socioeconomic-focused research. We then move to examine the field's present, by examining the submissions to this special issue and the five accepted papers that appear herein. This discussion provides a glimpse into the questions on m-commerce researchers' minds today; however, it also allows us to investigate what lies ahead in the future of m-commerce research as we move toward the more social-minded, hyperconnected world of tomorrow's social commerce (s-commerce).